Mixing Electric Guitars with David Glenn [Excerpt]

Hey, what’s up guys? David Glenn back for The Pro Audio Files and davidglennrecording.com.

Today’s video is an excerpt from my membership site. It’s called The Mix Academy. You may have heard of it. You can go to themixacademy.com right now and I’ve got a $1 trial. It gets you 30 days in the site.

Multi-tracks that you can download, practice your mixing, follow me start to finish tutorials, mix the song, add it to your resume. We’ve got a private community, all kinds of great stuff happening in there, and a new feature is what I’m calling interactive mix critiques.

Members are going to be able to send me their mixes, we’re going to filter through and pick several of them every month, and I’m going to import them into Pro Tools, and it’s not going to just be, “Hey, pull your kick up, pull your snare,” little things like that.

Of course that’ll be involved, but if I hear something in the low end that I would do different, I’m going to get down there and I’m going to show you — I’m going to open up plug-ins and kind of feature a couple of techniques and things for each of the mixes that get selected.

So some really cool stuff happening over there. $1 gets you in. themixacademy.com. We’ll put a link in the description below.

Moving on into today’s video, this is straight from The Mix Academy, and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again!

[mix]

Maybe I just leave those guys alone, because that was about the level that I felt them just kind of supporting the song and not dominating.

I do have this guitar out here…

[guitar]

That I automated a — the vocal delay, the eighth on the left, dotted eighth on the right, and it creates kind of a cool thing there.

[mix]

And I don’t want to make too many changes without Sonar Works on, but that could be a little dirtier. Let’s go to Decapitator and hit that guitar. Destruction — Punish mode here.

[guitar, adjusting Decapitator]

Take it out.

[guitar, no Decapitator]

Let’s hear that.

[mix]

Then I think that one needs a little bit of love at the end. We’ll write it from here, still palm guitars. Cool.

[mix]

A little bit towards the end. Let’s see where these come in at.

[mix]

Yeah, that’s ripping, breaking up a little bit. I don’t mind it.

But as far as the guitars go, like I said, trial and error, just trying to feel out, are they too warm? Pull down 200, 250. Not feeling them cut through the mix a bit, playing around with which frequencies to use to push them up.

They had that kind of 3-5kHz thing that I hate, so I didn’t boost there, but I boosted left of that to try to emphasize them a little bit, and I had a hard time with these guitars, but hopefully just letting them be a supporting role, and then pushing them up any time they have to be heard, like these little licks, hopefully that kind of served the purpose of the song — for the song.

The tremolo guitar here, I don’t even think I did anything, I just limited it a little bit.

Let’s hear without it.

[tremolo guitar]

ADVERTISEMENT

Just to get it to sit on top of the track, a little limiting.

Make sure it’s not too peaky.

[mix]

That’s probably even too loud. Pull back a little bit.

Okay, so again, guitars, nothing really that I wanted to emphasize. Some swells, I think I talked about this a little bit.

[mix]

[swells]

Just kind of shifts.

I feel like that could be warmer.

Let’s go to 200.

[mix]

And louder.

[mix]

And then it really needs to be louder at that shift right there, so guitar swells, let me find it on my controller, I think this is it.

[mix]

Latency, I’m not going to get it.

Okay, so let’s go read, volume, and right at the shift…

[mix]

So right in there, switch to slip mode so I can get it.

[guitar]

Go right before that peak, boost it up a little bit here.

[swells]

[mix]

Then we put another one and let this kind of fade out.

[mix]

Okay, so a little bit of love there, again, not much, I think with Devil-Loc on the swells, just to kind of help the starts of the swells not feel so distant. You got to be careful because while you want to level out the dynamics of a swell, so that you can hear it coming in and you know, then hitting and fading out, you can just make it feel like a swell is just flat, and then it defeats the purpose of having a swell in the first place.

So a little bit to kind of help the starts of it come up a bit, but not be too overwhelming, and then the SSL to warm it up. I think we just did that together.

Okay cool, so guitars, trial and error is the theme for those guitars. Let’s talk about this piano here…

David Glenn

David Glenn is a producer/engineer/musician based out of Orlando, FL. Credits include: Pablo Villatoro, Blanca Callahan (Group 1 Crew), Aimee Allen, and more. Learn more and get in touch at davidglennrecording.com.